“Evidence is mounting that President Obama was overly optimistic to pledge that there would be 1 million EVs on the road by 2015. Electric cars are not likely to form a significant part of the solution to America’s dependence on foreign oil, or to global warming, in the near future. They simply pose too many issues of price and practicality to attract a large segment of the car-buying public. More prosaic fuel-economy innovations such as conventional hybrids, clean-diesel cars and advanced gasoline engines all show much more promise than electrics.”

Putting aside the watered-down criticism, (it wasn’t “overly optimistic,” it was ideologically-driven nonsense) let’s focus on the conclusions drawn from the failure of electric cars.

The Post editors make no mention of the real boondoggle, which was the federal government getting into the car manufacturing business in the first place or how long we are all going to be paying for the Chevy Volt.

“If there is proof that Fisker and Tesla received loans because of political donations made by their backers, it will have diverted money from more effective opportunities, proving that government intervention in the economy is fundamentally fraught with inefficiency.”

Concluding that “government intervention in the economy is fundamentally fraught with inefficiency” is exactly what the Post editors still need to learn. A profit-driven market is going to be more efficient, no matte what. A government -sponsored enterprise may end up being worthwhile to the nation as a whole, but the inefficiencies are so great, the government causes such distortions because of its size and scale, and costs end up so high that the bar for entry ought to be considerably higher than its been in the past. Given the continued slow economy and high unemployment, seems more likely that another big idea to solve a big eceonomic problem will be forced down the throats of taxpayers for our own good and in the near term to boot.,